


Fugitives

by LindtLuirae



Series: Sakura x Uchihas Short Story Collection [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Romance, Song fic, follows itachi's final battle with sasuke, itasaku - Freeform, rogue sakura
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23944840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LindtLuirae/pseuds/LindtLuirae
Summary: “Do you understand,” she tries, no longer able to meet his eyes as she lays her heart bare, “that I have nowhere left to be but with you?”
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Itachi
Series: Sakura x Uchihas Short Story Collection [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726147
Comments: 42
Kudos: 160





	Fugitives

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this felt like waking up from a fever dream. I went into a writing coma at 4 a.m. and when I returned to myself this is what I found. 
> 
> I sincerely hope you enjoy it, I've been really digging ItaSaku lately.
> 
> Thank you sarcastic-mommy for sending Lady Inspiration my way, she's been absolutely delightful xx
> 
> Beta'd by SleepySnoozan. She's so, so lovely.

_I awake to find no peace of mind_

_I said, "How do you live as a fugitive_

_Down here where I cannot see so clear?"_

_I said, "What do I know_

_Show me the right way to go"_

In an abandoned house, in the depths of a basement, with so much thunder and wind and too much dripping blood, Sakura feels profound fear. 

For the first time in a long time, the cause of it is not the man in her company. It’s what she’s done. For him. Because of him. 

Blood drips down her shaking hands. “You’re so stupid, Sakura,” she whispers to herself. The sound of her hollow voice is surprisingly comforting, shattering through the howl of the storm above.

Piercing thunder echoed her sentiment as the skies split open and rain pattered down, vicious and unforgiving on a rotten roof and creaking floorboards. Konoha wouldn’t find them, not now, not ever. 

Itachi’s ragged breaths pull her back to the present and away from the terror of what she’s done. 

There’s so much blood. 

“It’s going to be okay,” she tells him, even when he's too gone to hear her. “I’m going to fix you.”

If her voice trembles and cracks, there’s no one around to hear and condemn her for it. No one to see that she, Sakura Haruno, freshly missing-nin, would break down so soon.

“You’re okay,” she says more firmly, no longer certain whether she was addressing Itachi or herself. 

The blood feels sticky in the nooks of her fingers. Sakura is most acquainted with blood, yet the sight of it dripping from Itachi’s mouth and pooling out of his hip wound is haunting. 

Her chakra pathways feel raw as she latches onto Itachi’s life-force with her own. But if she wants to save him, if she wants to stop the bleeding … Sakura feels ready to split herself in half trying. 

The conviction still baffles her. Once upon a time, Itachi had kidnapped her under the Akatsuki’s orders. Once upon a time, she would have gladly speared him in the heart if that’s what it takes to free herself from him. 

And then she learned. 

Well, that’s putting it too kindly. Sakura still feels defiled with the forbidden knowledge of what her village had done to the Uchiha. 

The Konoha she fought and bled for. The Konoha that brainwashed the man bleeding under her palms. The Konoha she left in the dust as she went chasing after the very man that made her life miserable for months. That Konoha. 

“This is what happens when you fall in love with missing nins Sakura,” she reprimands herself. “One would think we learned our lesson by now but guess we’re just called smart for nothing.”

Inner is silent.

Itachi’s breath scrapes across his bloodied throat in response. 

Sakura swallows against the dizziness of a brain so deprived of sleep. Her head is swimming, bubbling thoughts of nonsensicals busting from lips that shivered with cold. 

But Itachi’s fingertips were turning blue, so she covered him with her cloak. And then with her dress. And now she sits in her damn underwear, on the brink of passing out, with charred chakra coils that throbbed painfully. She sits and prays he will wake, curses Konoha, and threatens her drooping eyelids.

She’s not entirely sure if she’s sane. 

The blood, at least, no longer gushed out of him like a broken faucet. 

He still looks as pale as death. 

Isn’t it ironic that the man she once wished dead is the man she’s desperately saving now? 

It all leads back to Sasuke’s mission. Itachi’s own suicidal mission. Konoha’s fucking leaders. 

She’s so angry, so desperate, so cold that when the tears come, she doesn’t have it in her to stop them. 

Weakness. So much weakness, even when she thought Tsunade had beat it all out of her by now. What is she but this shaking, pathetic woman, crouched in her underwear over the body of an international criminal, running herself dry trying to save him? 

A whimper bursts from her lips as a violent shiver rattles through her body. The wound under her hands is slowly but surely closing. “Just a little more,” she croaks, hoping to find strength in her voice. 

She sounds pathetic too.

His breath is too slow. 

He's dying. 

What’s the use of closing his wound if his heart stops?

“Please,” she grits, “Please don’t … Please don’t do this now …”

This is all her fault. She shouldn’t have trusted him. She shouldn’t have listened to him. What was she thinking? What did she expect to happen when he went out to meet Sasuke?

Sasuke might’ve as well sent him back in a body bag.

“You’re so fucking horrible!” Sakura yells at the prone man. “Wake up! Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

She thumps him hard on his chest as the fight goes out of her. 

She curls over him, sobbing. Everything hurt, cold seeping into her bones. The chilly silence was even worse, his wheezing breaths her only company. 

If he dies … If he leaves her now, when she has nothing left, when nowhere is safe, when she feels so vulnerable, she’s not going to make it. 

Konoha is a burned bridge. No matter what Tsunade says, they would hang her for treason. A staggering bounty on her head leaves her a bright red target for hunter nins. 

Without Itachi here, with her, she’d be as good as dead. 

Sakura begins crying in earnest. Her chakra is as dry as a desert, and if she forces anymore out, who knows how many years she’d shave off her lifespan? 

And then what? 

She’d have to sit and watch Itachi die. 

The thought of losing him is too much; it makes her shake. She’d grown to know him, the real him. The man with a sweet tooth for dango and refined taste of literature. The man who brews tea in the middle of the night to soothe his aches. The man who speaks so softly of a brother that wishes to murder him. 

That man now lay dying. And all she could think about is how much she wishes she could rewind time a few days and go back to that starry evening on the roof. 

What she would give to go back. To beg him not to do this. To tell him she loves him. 

Something shifts beneath her, and it takes the tentative stroke of his fingers across her temple for Sakura to realise it’s Itachi regaining consciousness. 

“Itachi?” she whispers hoarsely. 

“What … are you ... doing?” he manages. His eyes are fever bright, and his damn hair clings to his clammy skin. He looks anything but elegant, yet the sight of his open eyes makes her heart surge back to life in her chest.

“Itachi!” she gasps, jerking back and reaching for her elusive chakra.

It burned like a livewire. 

Sakura thinks to hell with it and with living. She’s going to save Itachi even if it kills her. 

He watches her with hazy eyes, but they were open, and that’s all Sakura needs. 

“Stay,” she demands, glaring him in the eyes. She thinks perhaps the effect of it is a little lost under her wet kitten look and tear-streaked face. “Or so god help me … _stay_.”

Throughout it all, he watches her with a rueful sort of acceptance. 

“I’m … sorry,” Itachi rasps, and coughs hard. 

It makes the wound under her palms gush out some more blood. “No, Itachi, please … stay still okay—no, look at me, don’t close your eyes. Stay with me. Please.”

He forces open heavy eyelids. For her. 

It makes her tears start anew. “Good, just like that. Fuck … I can’t believe you. I can’t believe you’d try to die on me.”

His fingers reach up again, shaky and weak. They brush over a wet cheek.

Sakura can’t help it, her head tilts and she pressed cracked lips against his palm. “You’re an idiot,” her breath hitches over a sob, “Such a goddamn idiot …”

But he heals. He heals under her bruised hands. 

When the glow of Sakura’s chakra fade, there’s only silence within the stone walls. 

“I’m so cold,” she mumbles numbly.

“C’mere,” Itachi struggles to heft up the cloak.

Sakura crawls under it, burrowing against his side. 

He smells like rust and ozone, unlike his usual jasmine and warmth, but like this she can rest her ear over his chest and listen to his heartbeat. Like this, she knows he's alive. 

“Sleep,” he tells her, his voice still so weak. His arm wraps around her. The weight of it is enough to lull her into a sense of security that chases away the nightmares long enough for her to drift off. 

_I awake to see that no one is free_

_We're all fugitives_

_Look at the way we live_

_Down here I cannot sleep from fear no_

_I said, "Which way do I turn?"_

_Oh I forget everything I learn_

Sakura wakes up gasping from memories of saltwater burning in her nose. 

It takes her a moment to remember that Mizugakure was miles away and that she’s free of the Akatsuki’s clutches. 

And another moment to notice that Itachi isn’t there. 

She jerks up, dislodging the pile of makeshift blankets and nearly gives herself a concussion as the room spins violently and she goes thumping back down.

“Ugh,” she cries out, curling on herself. Her head feels like it might split in half, the pounding of her heart striking angrily in her skull. 

Itachi appears the next moment, clearly still unwell, but at least upright and moving. In his hands lies a skinned and cooked rabbit.

“You went _hunting_?” she says incredulously, through a pained moan. 

“Of course, or else we’ll starve,” he crouches down beside her, and helps her up.

Itachi’s pain tolerance will never fail to floor her. He must be in agony just breathing, as damaged as his lungs were and with a freshly healed wound in his hip. 

He knocked death's door, yet there he is. And Sakura couldn’t so much as sit up without feeling like she was dying. 

“Come on,” he cajoles gently as he uses a kunai to take a piece out of the meat and presses it against her lips.

Sakura eats. 

Itachi watches her. 

“Are we going to talk about what you did?” she asks and is only met with stony silence. 

Itachi feeds her another piece.

“When were you planning to tell me you were leaving me behind?” Sakura glares at him.

“...It had to be done,” Itachi eventually says. He looks so delicate in the tattered remains of his clothes, bandaged up and with eyes so haunted. “Sasuke had to finish his mission … he had to do it. I had to … but … You wouldn’t let me go, would you?”

“Damn right I wouldn’t!” Sakura hissed. “I left Konoha for you!”

“You should go back,” he tells her without emotion. 

He looks as numb as she feels. 

“To hell with that! I’m not going back there even if it kills me,” Sakura spats. 

“It might.” Itachi kills her as gently as possible. 

“I don’t care,” she hisses, even when there’s a pain in her heart that’s so piercing it makes her want to hunch over and scream. “I’m not going anywhere. And you sure as hell aren’t dying on me.”

Silence envelopes them as Itachi continues to feed her. 

His eyes are far away, but he wears a look of such anguish it hurts to even look at him. 

But she nearly lost him. She can’t look anywhere else. She can’t take her eyes off the sight of him sitting up, his pallor no longer ashen, his eyes no longer sunken. 

“I’m sorry,” he says once his eyes regain focus, and zero in on her. “For all the trouble I caused you. For everything.”

It makes Sakura want to cry. “Are you really? What do you think would’ve happened to me if you died?”

Judging by the guilty expression on his face, he probably hasn’t thought of that. 

It makes Sakura seethe with pain and fury and hurt. Yet, she could articulate none of it to him. How could she explain that she has become dependent? That she has grown weak? That she’s fallen for this false sense of security his presence provides. 

How could she tell him that she spent the last few months losing pieces of her heart to him, and now he owns all of it? 

“Do you understand,” she tries, no longer able to meet his eyes as she lays her heart bare, “that I have nowhere left to be but with you?”

His breath catches. 

Sakura glances at him again, and he looks wrecked.

She’d find the time to feel guilty about that later. After she’s made sure he understood what is at stake for her. 

“Don’t you?” she demands. “It’s you or death from now on. And maybe a while ago I would’ve picked death but now I pick you. I choose you. So stop trying to quit on me!”

There’s nothing left for him to feed her, and nothing left for her to say.

Well, except a million and one things, but she’ll take those to the grave. 

Itachi’s hands clench over his thighs. “I …” he begins, trails off unsurely. “Why? Why would you …” he looks frustrated by his loss of words.

“Why would I?” Sakura says with a healthy dose of cynicism. “That’s a good question. Why would I? You kidnapped me after all. You did everything you could to make my life hell— and you have. You’ve succeeded! Look at me, I have no village, no honour left. I threw everything to the wind and followed you. 

“I don’t know why, Itachi. Sometimes I do irrational things. I think with my heart instead of my brain. I look at you and I can’t fucking breathe. I watched you nearly die and all I could think is if you die, I would, too. I really would.

“You wreck me. Look at me. Look how undignifying this whole thing is. And yet … gods, you make me so mad. I’m such a mess and it’s all your fault and I can’t let you go because I … Because I …”

She chewed her lip bloody as she fought to swallow down three little words that would be the last nail in her coffin. 

“Sakura …” Itachi says gravely. 

When she turns to regard him, he surges forward, and she feels his mouth on hers. 

It makes her gasp, but it’s instantly lost in the heat of his mouth. He still tastes like blood. 

Sakura’s brain swims. 

She clings to balance with the force of her will alone. 

And then she gives up and clings onto Itachi, instead. 

It’s not a heated kiss. 

It still burns on her lips as he draws back and breathes her in. “I’m sorry,” he says huskily. The pad of his thumb strokes her chin as he tilts it.

Dusky eyes peer into hers. “I don’t deserve you,” he enunciates. “Not a single inch of you.”

She drinks him in. Dark eyes and pale skin and chapped lips. 

Her lips tingled with the ghost of his. 

“That’s not up to you,” she tells him with more conviction than she feels. “That’s up to me.”

The corner of his mouth curves up in reluctant agreement. “Perhaps. I just thought … Sakura, you’d be better off without me. You know it, I know it. Don’t throw away your life like this.”

“Kinda already have, Itachi,” she leans closer into him, “so why don’t you stop running and just …” 

His breath tickles her face. Sakura is drawn in like she’s caught in a magnet field. 

The taste of him, although odd and tainted with blood, is addicting. “Stay …” she whispered against his mouth.

His lips part under hers. 

Sakura’s palms cup his scarred cheeks and hold him close as she takes in the heat of his mouth and melts under it. 

“Stay,” she says again, as she bestows another kiss on cracked lips. “Please.”

His hands reach for her and without words, there’s his answer as he draws her close, to him, into him. 

Sakura goes willingly, tasting his surrender. 

It feels like victory. 

_And if we don't hide here_

_They're gonna find us_

_And if we don't hide now_

_They're gonna catch us where we sleep_

He holds her hand as they run. She squeezes it in return with knowledge that this is her only certainty from here on out. 

Sakura would live the rest of her life being hunted. 

More aptly, she thinks, as she pulls him to her and presses him against a tree for a savage kiss, she would live the rest of her life running with him, _for_ him.

Itachi meets the passion of her kiss with the same sacred gravity he affords everything that comes to her. With reverence and care and his own leashed passion shining through the parted seams of his lips. 

“Together?” she asks when they part for breath and he looks positively unearthed in the cage of her arms.

“Yes.” Itachi leans in and kisses her again. 

This is what Sakura kills and dies for now. 

**Author's Note:**

> Real talk though, am I doing them any justice at all? I've shipped ItaSaku for years but I don't really write them much, so this is new territory. 
> 
> What's your favourite Sakura x Uchiha ship? Mine is probably ShiSaku.
> 
> Let me know if you liked this and I'll give ya more ;) xx


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